Our annual New Year’s Eve dinner with a small handful of friends commenced at 6 p.m. on December 31st with a matsutake and lardo pizza and copious amounts of champagne.

Through the several hours of the carefully planned and sourced meal, we would dine our way through seven courses (pizza not included), six or seven bottles of pinot noir and a magnum of Francis Ford Coppola-autographed 1980-something Neibaum-Coppola cabernet (you can’t keep that stuff forever), some French and Australian wines, a bit of mescal and more. A bit foggy as I write…

Here are some of the highlights. Happy New Year! And see if you can find the Monty Python joke somewhere in there…